The Agfinity Grain Calculator

Put this handy free app on your smartphone to convert grain prices in a hurry

Gone are the days of carrying around pocketbooks from the elevator with the conversion charts in the back of them for different crop weights and tonnages. Our smartphones have replaced almost everything to do with calculators or daily calculations. That’s why I was pleased to see the Agfinity Grain Calculator — an app that will do different weight and dollar calculations for almost all the most common crops grown on the Prairies and can be downloaded on either an IPhone or Ipad.

Apps like this come in particularly handy in an industry like agriculture where most people have their own preferential unit for weight or price, and it usually is not the same as yours. Want to connect a per tonne canola price to a per bushel price? Need to know how many bushels of oats are in that load? This is the app for you.

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The Agfinity calculator is set up as a standard calculator with a few more selections for crops and your desired conversions. At the top of the calculator you will notice a list of crops that you can use for conversion. The only common crop missing from this list is lentils. However there are quite a few other crops that are close to the same bushel weight as lentils so you have your choice there depending on which you feel is the closest.

The only other difference from a normal calculator is the selection bar for your weights or price figures. This bar is located just above the number pad and is characterized by orange selections for weights or purple for prices. A purple dollar sign button it the easiest way to switch between the orange weight selections and the purple currency buttons. The rest of the calculator works in a regular fashion if you need to do a little math to find out the exact number you are looking to convert.

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Using the Agfinity calculator is not a whole lot more complicated than just finding where these selections are. There may be more than one way to do a conversion but here is the method I have found to work the best for me: First make sure you have selected between weights or prices. This can keep the conversion from accidentally switching into loads or dollars that you may not necessarily want.

After this I type in the number or do the math needed to get to the number that is needed for conversion. Selecting the crop from the list above the number pad should be the next thing you will do. This is really because as soon as you start tapping the conversion buttons, the calculator will convert units between your selections and this leaves room for error. Notice also that once you make a selection, the crop or unit then follows the number in the very top panel of your screen.

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Once you select your crop, selecting the unit the conversion is happening “from.” Tapping the unit that the conversion is going “to” will complete the process. If you would like to go from bushels to pounds to metric tonnes, pressing the bu button, then the lb and finally the mt to go through this conversion allowing you to figure out all the weights for the current number. The process is exactly the same for the dollar amounts as well letting allowing conversion between $/mt, $/lb. and $/bu.

All in all this is a great little app that I personally pull up in place of any other calculator on my phone.